Comment by xp84
3 hours ago
Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
How does this work?
There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would that not helping other people is immoral.
Opinions differ.
The issue is that only Congress had the authority to cut funding to a congressionally authorized program. What Elon did was illegal and also heinous.
> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.